Contextualising the Notion of Context in Jurilinguistic Studies

Abstract

Context is a notion that is commonly invoked in many linguistic studies, either with very general reference or, more specifically, in the light of one of a number of research approaches which assign distinct definitions to context, ranging from factors that can be recovered from a text, through social parameters serving as an index for the appropriation of discursive performance, to factors that bring texts into being and give them meaning. This exploratory and descriptive research problematises the notion of context specifically on the grounds of English/Polish translation of corporate documentation processed in company registration proceedings, touching upon factors that are presumed to be discursively relevant in this communicative situation. The study is conducted from the perspective of the sociocultural approach and it adopts the parallel corpus methodology. The author discusses the concept of context on the ground of legal communication and secondarily presents a corpus-based description of the context categories that are idiosyncratic and potentially discursively relevant for the said communicative situation in the cross-linguistic perspective. The contextual variation is tested for its capacity to affect translation performance. The results reveal specific tendencies as regards the distribution patterns in the values corresponding to the investigated context categories. They point to some divergencies in translation output caused by the source text variantivity and they pave the way and directions for further research. Already at this stage the findings may have significant pedagogical value and they constitute a solid starting point for sociolinguistic research on discourse variantivity.

Quantitative Distribution of Verbal Structures with Reference to the Authorship Factor in Legal Stylistics

“…The search is claimed to be exhaustive on the grounds of applying systemic search criterion and digitalizing all the texts on file for the year 2017 which meet the criterion of a case with a foreign element. For related analyses based on CorpCourt see, for example, (Więcławska 2019a(Więcławska , 2019b(Więcławska , 2020.…”

“…3 For more extensive description of the context categories coded for the texts making up the corpus see (Więcławska, 2020). 4 The concepts of professional title and institutional name cover more authorship categories compared to previous studies which were based on samples of the corpus used for this analysis (Więcławska, 2019a).…”

The Role of Culture in Legal Languages, Legal Interpretation and Legal Translation

“…Despite the intention for precision and accuracy, legal discourse is oftentimes archaic, complex, and ambiguous. As many scholars [24][25][26][27][28] highlight, this complexity and ambiguity are strongly affected by history, religion, ethics, philosophy and the culture of a particular nation. Duranti [24, p. 277] argues that"if we want to understand what people mean with, through and sometimes despite their words, one must look beyond linguistic means … meanings are seen as located not only in language, but in social values, beliefs, social relationships, and larger exchange and support systems, including family structure and the social organisation of the community".…”

“…Duranti [24, p. 277] argues that"if we want to understand what people mean with, through and sometimes despite their words, one must look beyond linguistic means … meanings are seen as located not only in language, but in social values, beliefs, social relationships, and larger exchange and support systems, including family structure and the social organisation of the community". In that vein it is worth mentioning the research conducted by Więcławska [27] in which the concept of context on the ground of legal communication is discussed along with a corpus-based description of the context categories which are relevant for such communication.…”

“…Duranti [ 24 , p. 277] argues that”if we want to understand what people mean with, through and sometimes despite their words, one must look beyond linguistic means … meanings are seen as located not only in language, but in social values, beliefs, social relationships, and larger exchange and support systems, including family structure and the social organisation of the community”. In that vein it is worth mentioning the research conducted by Więcławska [ 27 ] in which the concept of context on the ground of legal communication is discussed along with a corpus-based description of the context categories which are relevant for such communication. The study is carried out from the perspective of the sociocultural approach and the notion of context is examined on the grounds of English/Polish translation of corporate documentation processed in company registration proceedings, taking into consideration factors that are presumed pertinent in legal communication i.e.…”